Rosie O’Donnell: Tracy & I Plan To Blend Our Families

This Monday (January 25), Rosie O’Donnell sits down with Oprah Winfrey in a no holds barred conversation about her breakup after 12 years with Kelli Carpenter, her new girlfriend Tracy Kachtick-Anders, her home life with her four kids, and her plans to blend a rather large family, People reports.

Promoting her January 31 HBO special A Family Is A Family Is A Family: A Rosie O’Donnell Celebration, a documentary that challenges the traditional ideas of family, Rosie talks about co-parenting four children – Parker, 14, Chelsea, 12, Blake, 10, and Vivienne, 7 – with Kelli since their breakup.

Although we co-parent,” says Rosie, “we share equal time but we’re never really without them. Some are here. And that’s the way we did it. It’s free-flowing, and we do nights together, too.” Explaining that Kelli “lives nearby,” Rosie also says that is still “not close enough. I wanted her to live in the same town, and she was, like, ‘I don’t know how good that’s gonna be for me.’ Like, what are you saying? You can’t exist – okay. Calm down. Breathe. Everything’s okay.”

Click below to read about Rosie and Tracy’s plans to blend their families…
On what attracted her to her new girlfriend, Tracy – who has six children of her own – Rosie says, “So she got out of the car in Miami and I was, like, zoinks, you know, because she’s absolutely gorgeous and, I don’t know, I felt like I knew her right away. It was very odd.”

Oprah then asked the next obvious question: “So are you gonna move to live together?”

“Yes,” replies Rosie. “As soon as we can arrange the kids’ thing where she lives in Texas, you know.”

Oprah also asked about her abrupt departure from The View in 2007. Rosie says that when it came to confronting her boss Barbara Walters: “And for me at that moment, if I had been braver, I would have just cried and said you really hurt my feelings.”

If this one goes bad, the kids will have to go through yet another breakup. Sometimes it works best if both people in a relationship keep their own residences. That’s a lot of people to blend together under one roof.

Geography seems to be a problem here. The insistence on living together with one partner or another seems forced. Surely separate residences wouldn’t be harmful to the children and could easily be afforded. Still, I wish them all well and hope the parents take their children’s best interests to heart as a first concern. It can’t be easy living life on display, I don’t envy any of them.